The fun game of visiting Mexico and trying to be like Roberto Bolaño

BarcelonaHow many things have happened on the boards of Café La Habana, Mexico CityA café to be protected, without Anglicisms or modern Scandinavian furniture. Here you find the same tables, the same waiters, and the same life as always. Although reality isn't always as it may initially appear, as Roberto Bolaño knew. This café has become a place of pilgrimage for the Chilean poet's still numerous legion of admirers. What would he have thought seeing hundreds of people with books in their bags retracing the scenes where he lived? He would surely have made a joke and perhaps sent them to the wrong café.

Forgive me, Mexicans, but a good traveling companion in Mexico City is Bolaño, a universal Chilean, a cursed poet, who lived there in two different periods before arriving in Catalonia. In the Mexican capital, he was one of the fathers of infrarealism, a poetic movement to which he dedicates his book. The Savage Detectives. Especially its first part is nothing more than a walk through the capital, slightly altering reality. Places like Colonia Roma, Colonia Condesa, and the historic center were the settings for the author's and his characters' walks, who would no longer recognize much in Colonia Roma, where American digital nomads have transformed it in the last decade. To walk through Mexico The Savage Detectives You have to start with breakfast at the Café La Habana, a place where you can puff out your chest, since here Gabriel García Márquez wrote drafts of One Hundred Years of SolitudeThe poet Octavio Paz also worked there—in fact, in the book, the protagonists attend one of his talks—and it was the place Bolaño chose in 1975 to take his friends from the UNAM creative poetry workshop. That's why the Chilean writer wanted it to appear in the book, but with a new name: Café Quito. A good game is to try to find out which establishments the author mentions, if they still exist. After breakfast, you can walk toward the Alameda to read and rest, as the book's protagonist, Juan García Madero, did.

Many people walk up and down Colima Street trying to figure out where the elegant two-story house with a garden belonging to Joaquín Font, the architect and father of two poets in the book's protagonist's group, might be. In fact, many Bolaño admirers walk the streets with the almost morbid desire to find out where the book is set. Since the author kept changing names and details, it's a rather entertaining kind of scavenger hunt. Visiting the city following a book where not everything is real becomes a slow walk to discover what life is like in Mexico, through lively but less touristy streets and neighborhoods. A very real experience. Or sub-real.

Recommendation for traveling to Mexico City.

Book: The Savage Detectives

Author: Roberto Bolaño

Editorial: Anagram